Mike Abbott, who recently stepped down as vice president of engineering for Twitter, has joined the prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a general partner.

Abbott will focus on Kleiner's digital practice, helping startups involved in social, mobile, and the cloud. A key part of his role will also be to help portfolio companies hire talent, which in the Valley these days is a constant and expensive struggle.

While at Twitter, Abbott amped up the engineering team from 80 to more than 350 people in less than a year and a half. Before that, he led the development team at Palm responsible for WebOS.

Bringing on Abbott seems a big score for Kleiner Perkins, especially since immediately after leaving Twitter he joined Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

Abbott is the third senior partner Kleiner Perkins has added in three years. The others are Bing Gordon, who's focused on the social web, and Mary Meeker, the longtime Internet analyst with Morgan Stanley.

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